Commuter

by James Belflower

Poetry. Modeling the courage of the witness as a compelling poetic subjectivity, COMMUTER attempts to encourage response by negotiating notions of the self. Juliana Spahr calls COMMUTER "a painfully beautiful and transformatively aestheticized book."

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

James Belflower is a poet, critic, and performer who lives in Albany, NY with his wife, Jessica, and their dachshund, Jake. He received a Ph.D. in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics from SUNY Albany. His creative and critical work, broadly speaking, focuses on employing artistic models to investigate our embeddedness in the material world. He is the coauthor of the multimedia project Canyons (Flimb Press 2016) with Matthew Klane, The Posture of Contour (Spring Gun Press 2013), Commuter (Instance Press 2009), and Bird Leaves the Cornice, winner of the 2011 Spring Gun Press Chapbook Prize. His poems, essays, and reviews appear, or are forthcoming in: Aufgabe, Fence, New American Writing, 1913, and Drunken Boat, among others. With Matthew Klane, he co-curates the Yes! Poetry and Performance Series whose mission is to bring writing into conversation with other art forms.

Reviews

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

During an age ravaged by The Plague and other brutalities that often truncated lifespans, “memento mori” portraits became a popular mode of painting. The subjects, countered with skulls, wilting flowers and rotting fruit, reminded a viewer of his or her mortality. James Belflower’s Commuter operates in much the same way as one of these memento mori. This debut, full-length book of poetry reminds the reader that, with the 21st century's plague of terrorist bombings, death and destruction are always adjacent to the "normal" moment.

The reader begins the ride with the prologue’s color picture of a subway map. The representation of an underground system of tunnels offers an excellent visual association given that public transportation is so often targeted in attacks. On a deeper level, however, the image begins an intricate patterning of circulation that recurs through the rest of the book.

[To read this review in its entirety, please visit: http://fact-simile.blogspot.com/2009_...]

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Instance Press's newest book, and James' first book. We are excited by its formal challenge and ambition and its intelligent opening to issues of contemporary terror and violence. The writing is versatile--sometimes lyric, sometimes reportorial, sometimes even witty. I'd say it makes for good companion works to such books at Travis Macdonald's O Mission Repo or Janet Holmes' The Ms of My Kin. Unlike those books, Commuter is not an erasure text, but it does use extra-poetic resources and engages a compelling critique of western culture and its violence.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing!

[Joe]

Just read. Am ridiculously intrigued by the huge fissures between things. Demands a second or third read. Hoping to do so.